With the holiday season upon us I was inspired to tell a brief tale of a magical New Year’s Eve (the fact that I’m on vacation and sitting on my couch also helped). The more I think about the title of this post the more I think this should be about the New Year's Eve when I went to see Manowar, Dio, and Megadeth at the Nassau Colosseum, got totally f'd up on mescaline and got lost on the way home. Maybe another time.
I think it was 1989/1990, but the year isn’t as important as the fact that it was COLD. Not only was it cold but it had been cold for a week or so. That night the big shindig was going down at Wade’s house and we were all looking forward to a night of fun and debauchery. The thing about Wade’s house is that it was on the boarder of Newark (truth be told it might actually have been in Newark), not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I wanted to paint a picture of the neighborhood. I think I went there with Jeff, and after parking down the block we started walking towards Wade’s. We got about 2 houses away and were literally stopped in our tracks by what we saw. Parked on the street was a car that was covered in 2”-3” of ice. The strange part is that we hadn’t had any snow, rain, or any other precipitation. Yet here was a car that was totally encased in ice to the point that it was iced to the ground. I have never seen anything else like it before or since. Someone had to be responsible, and to be honest we were a little upset that we had never thought of such a prank/act of vandalism.
After collecting our wits and entering the party the night proceeded with quite a few memorable incidents. Wade lived on the second floor of a 2 family house, and with all of the people crammed in there it got quite hot. At one point this dude was pissing out an open window, and in his drunken state started to fall forward out of the window. Luckily my buddy witnessed the whole thing and grabbed him by the back of his pants averting disaster. Next a fight broke out in the bathroom. There was a line for the bathroom and to be honest I forget how the argument started, but at one point this dude that I was friends with was getting stomped in the bath tub by two of my best friends with the door shut and locked. Shit happens, what can you do? The caper of the evening came at the stroke of midnight when there was a spontaneous alcohol spraying fight in the kitchen – beer, champagne, wine, even some soda, being sprayed with reckless abandon all while Wade was screaming trying to stop it. When the booze settled there must have been 2 inches of liquid on his floor.
Oh, this was the night we also convinced my buddy’s drunken sister that she was adopted.
All in all a good night.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Raise the Roof
I was at dinner the other night with my wife and for some reason this incident came to mind. My wife was understandably disturbed when I told her about it.
If there’s one thing I’ve come to appreciate while remembering these stories it’s the old saying that, “idle hands make the devil’s work”. About half of us were living in single parent homes and as a result we were more or less on our own after school until our mothers got home from work. But the fact remains, if you leave kids to their own devices bad things will eventually happen. This is another one of those cases.
I’m not even sure how this whole event happened, it just did. We were hanging out at Ben’s house after school and before I knew it we were all climbing out his third floor bathroom window to climb up onto the roof of his house. In retrospect this was not the smartest thing to do. Ben lived in a 3 story house with a pitched roof. To get to the “top” of the roof you had to climb out a window onto this ledge, then you’d climb 15 feet up this 1 foot wide section of roof – it was so steep that you had to hold onto the edge of the roof line while you climbed up. One slip and you were literally dead. It was a 40-50 foot drop off the side of the roof into the neighbor’s driveway.
I’m sure it will come as no surprise that this isn’t the end of the story. Once on top of the roof we once again got bored and started ripping the shingles off and throwing them. If you’ve never thrown a shingle (and why would you have) they are GREAT for throwing. They are heavy enough to get some good speed, but aerodynamic enough to really travel good distances. So we started chucking shingles at kids walking by, and then cars driving by. Being idiots cracking up the whole time we weren’t exactly hard to spot. But you never think about the consequences when you are a kid. The scariest part about the whole ordeal was trying to get down from the roof. You basically had to go backwards down this 1 foot wide slope holding on with 1 hand with a 40 ft drop to your right.
I think we did the shingle throwing thing 2 or 3 times before someone informed Ben’s mother and she put an end to it. Man, if my kid’s ever ripped up the shingles on my house I’d kill them. What were we thinking? Oh yeah, that it would be funny to hit kids walking by with shingles.
If there’s one thing I’ve come to appreciate while remembering these stories it’s the old saying that, “idle hands make the devil’s work”. About half of us were living in single parent homes and as a result we were more or less on our own after school until our mothers got home from work. But the fact remains, if you leave kids to their own devices bad things will eventually happen. This is another one of those cases.
I’m not even sure how this whole event happened, it just did. We were hanging out at Ben’s house after school and before I knew it we were all climbing out his third floor bathroom window to climb up onto the roof of his house. In retrospect this was not the smartest thing to do. Ben lived in a 3 story house with a pitched roof. To get to the “top” of the roof you had to climb out a window onto this ledge, then you’d climb 15 feet up this 1 foot wide section of roof – it was so steep that you had to hold onto the edge of the roof line while you climbed up. One slip and you were literally dead. It was a 40-50 foot drop off the side of the roof into the neighbor’s driveway.
I’m sure it will come as no surprise that this isn’t the end of the story. Once on top of the roof we once again got bored and started ripping the shingles off and throwing them. If you’ve never thrown a shingle (and why would you have) they are GREAT for throwing. They are heavy enough to get some good speed, but aerodynamic enough to really travel good distances. So we started chucking shingles at kids walking by, and then cars driving by. Being idiots cracking up the whole time we weren’t exactly hard to spot. But you never think about the consequences when you are a kid. The scariest part about the whole ordeal was trying to get down from the roof. You basically had to go backwards down this 1 foot wide slope holding on with 1 hand with a 40 ft drop to your right.
I think we did the shingle throwing thing 2 or 3 times before someone informed Ben’s mother and she put an end to it. Man, if my kid’s ever ripped up the shingles on my house I’d kill them. What were we thinking? Oh yeah, that it would be funny to hit kids walking by with shingles.
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